Elon Musk wins no matter which presidential candidate does

No matter what happens with democracy and the upcoming presidential election, Elon Musk wins. That’s because despite all that the billionaire has done to drive users away, news still happens on his social media platform X, née Twitter.

Case in point: Joe Biden, the president of the United States who Musk has been actively campaigning against, both on the site and with $45 million a month in real-world money, announced yesterday that he was no longer running for president on X. As of Monday morning, his post had more than 360 million views, while most of his other recent posts are in the single digit millions.

Musk celebrated the exposure, tweeting “White House aides learned Biden was dropping out by reading 𝕏.”

(Of course, all that traffic needs to eventually turn into revenue and then profit, which is a thing the company has struggled with lately.)

Donald Trump, who has more than twice the number followers of both the Biden and POTUS accounts, hasn’t posted on X in nearly a year. Even after Musk reinstated his account, Trump has said he would stick with his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he’s obligated to wait six hours before posting elsewhere.

During the Republican National Convention last week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino noted the high volume of traffic the event drew to X. US traffic to X was up 11% the week of the RNC compared to a week earlier, according to data from Similarweb. (The timeframe of that week also included the failed attempt on Donald Trump’s life.) Traffic for Truth Social, owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, was up nearly 200%. Of course, X is much bigger than Truth — X saw more than 100 times the traffic Truth did during the week of the RNC.

Next month’s Democratic National Convention will likely be a boon to X as well, with Democrats set to roll out several big-name speeches — likely Harris, her VP pick, and potentially Biden and Obama.

Of course, there are bigger questions out there like whether a social media platform owned by a highly partisan billionaire that’s filled with hateful rhetoric and armies of subsidized bots should be the de facto place for public discourse on the future of democracy.

As New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker put it on The Daily podcast this morning, “When we first saw the online message the first reaction we had was, is this real or is this a fake. We didn't hit the done button till we confirmed with two White House officials that it was for real, because we didn’t expect that if he was going to do it, it would be just like that on an online posting.”